IF SELLING PIZZA WAS LIKE SELLING TECHNOLOGY

Last week I was reading some twitts from @radfahrer when I found this old funny text (pt only) comparing the communication&marketing business with a pizza business. After reading I thought that with some little changes it could work for us too, so here it is:

Imagine the situation below

Your customer calls you asking for a pizza but he’s more concerned about the delivery cost than with the quality of ingredients that you are going to use to cook it.

When you are still making the pizza the customer calls asking for a “pizza-preview” so he can approve – or disapprove – the way you are cooking it.

After he receives the pizza-preview the customer asks for a small modification: replace the yellow mozzarela for a green one, simply because its his favorite color. Now you have to throw away all the old pizza work and start making a new one, which will give you much more work and will probabily taste awful.

The customer calls you one random night asking for 500 pizzas and telling that you have 15 minutes to delivery it, he explains that he’s going to give a very important strategic party on the next few hours and he decided to call you – his main business partner – just now.

You summon your best chefs to help you on this special request because it’s urgent and leave the other client’s pizzas waiting aside, so they call you complaining that their pizza is late.

After you prepare almost all the pizzas from the urgent request the special client calls you communicating that his pizzas isn’t urgent anymore, he confused the days… in fact the pizzas are for tomorow night.

Your client hear of a new fashion cool unique ingredient and he is conviced that his pizza must have this ingredient, even that the fashion ingredient doesn’t have anything to do with pizza, giving you a headache to implement it.

Your customer asks for a high-urgent pizza delivery that needs to be done in 5 minutes. After you use your best chefs – and even hiring freelancers chefs to help you on the job – and again delaying the other requests, you delivery it and the customer takes 4 hours to start eating those pizzas.

The customer asks for a pizza that pleases people who likes small, medium and big pizzas – a magic one – without worring if it will demand the double of the normally work – he doesn’t agreed to pay more for this also.

You cook a wonderful perfect pizza for your customer and delivery it on time and than he calls you complaining that he doesn’t have the necesssary tools – knifes and forks – for eating it.

The client calls you asking for a super ultrablaster enhanced pizza and simply doesn’t understand why you need to charge so expensive for that pizza if the chinese can cook a pizza for much less.

Other customer calls you and asks for a pizza, he’s shocked by the price and tells you that his nephew can cook a pizza too by a tenth of your price – he uses a pizza-template from the internet and get his ingredients at eBay.

The client requests a wonderful pizza but warns you that he had already order the same pizza at 5 different restaurants and tells you that he will agree to pay just for the one he enjoyed the most.

The customer send you an email attaching a zipped 20MB file containing more than 5.000 pizza’s recipes and a history of all the pizzas he ate on his life and asks you for a pizza. When you ask for which kind of pizza he awnsers that “this information has already been shared”.

The customer decides to create a public pizza request based on the lowest price and asks for a unique pizza flavor that you have never cooked before, so when you ask for more information about this special pizza – and calculate how much you are going to spend at the ingredients – he tells you that “aditional information will be given only to the winner”.

You have a security-freak customer that wants his pizza to be delivered only at his security guard house, after doing that the guard needs to delivery the pizza himself to your client’s house – which is next to your restaurant – after that he calls you complaining that the pizza arrived cold.

Your client request a pizza and you agreed to receive the payment just 90 days before he ate the pizza – and only if he liked it, otherwise you need to cook it again.

I make up a few hehehe… any similarities?

It’s just a joke, but I find interesting to see how different business like marketing and telecommunications presents those same issues… I mean, sometimes the concept of partnership is put aside on this business on my personal opinion.